Binhexed attachments and Mozilla (hexbin, macutils)

Last modified on July 24, 2026 • 2 min read • 225 words OK, today I tried to open the final version of the manuscript for Cell & Tissue Research. My boss sent it to me as an e-mail attachment some 2 weeks ago. I use Mozilla Mail and saved the attachment. Open Office didn’t manage to open it. Obviously my boss uses still Macintosh binhex encoding to attach files to his e-mail instead of MIME to make himself as incompatible to the rest of the world as possible. There is luckily the command line utility hexbin in Linux, which converts the binhexed file into some readable stuff:hexbin -3 Lymphangio_review_CTR.docThat is the theory. The conversion didn’t succeed with the error message “unexpected EOF”. I suspected that Mozilla was involved and thus I used pine to extract the attachment and voila hexbin managed to convert the macintosh-gibberish into three files.For these three different files the only useful part (the Word Document data) appeared as Lymphangio_review_CTR.doc.data. From this I still had to delete the .data ending and Open Office had no problems anymore to open it. Whow. It took me only 2 hours to figure out all that stuff (including to set up pine locally to access the e-mail server via SSL-secured connection). I still have to figure out why Mozilla Mail handles binhexed attachments wrongly…The hexbin utility is e.g. included in the macutils package (available for Suse and RedHat).